Ohio Rehabilitation and Correction officials said convicted kidnapper Ariel Castro was found hanging in his prison cell at the Correctional Reception Center in Orient.
He finally did something right. May he rot in niflhel.
Mayor Stubbs of Talkeetna, Alaska, was attacked over the weekend. Stubb’s spokesperson Lauri Stec said that in the attack the mayor suffered a fractured sternum and a punctured lung and required three hours of surgery.
The would-be assassin is still in hiding. This hasn’t received much press… and I doubt it will, because this is clearly a race-based hate crime that doesn’t fit the medias preferred narrative.
Feh.
“The Hum” is one of those worldwide phenomena that you just don’t know what to make of. Sometimes it’s a very low-level, barely detectable thing; sometimes it apparently seems to dominate the world. Most people don’t hear it, even in places where it’s supposedly common. The likeliest explanation – when it’s heard by multiple people – is that it is a real sound originating from a considerable distance away, being allowed to be heard due to unusual geological and/or atmospheric phenomena.
And then of course there are the hoaxes. Lots and lots of hoaxes. Like the Kiev video I linked to early last year, which was apparently made by simply blaring modified sound effects from “War of the Worlds.” Audio hoaxes are of course a hell of a lot easier than video hoaxes, and video hoaxes are pretty damn easy these days. Just whip up some creepy sound, blare it real loud from a boombox, and record. Easy.
Still, sometimes there are some vids that are compelling, such as this recent one from Canada:
[youtube FHi6LjKuNl4]
This one isn’t so much a “hum” as a “horrifying metallic screech.” This one has managed to score some press, such as:
and
This sound was apparently heard by many people, and many theories are put forward. However, there’s this:
On Friday afternoon city spokesperson Alisa Thompson said she had a simpler explanation — it was a city worker grinding down the blade on a grader.
“The grader blade needed to be straightened. Kind of gets ground down, and it makes a very strange noise. It’s as simple as that,” said Thompson.
“The video, the YouTube video, is actually right around the corner from the arena, and that’s where our employee was doing the straightening.”
Sometimes the creepy bizarre phenomena is actually real, just really, really boring. Still, like Halloween and politics, sometimes it’s fun to just pretend. And it *is* a creepy sound; I suspect more than one good sci-fi story could be formed from this nucleus.
Recently published a color photo of the south pole of Mars taken by the European Space Agency’s Mars Express spacecraft. Not true color, but a mashup of blue, green and infrared, but still quite striking. CLICK HERE to see the full-rez version.
Claim:
The claim is made that Russia’s Security Council is considering a ban on selling RD-180’s to the US. This would kill the Atlas V, since the US does not have a second source for the engine. Back in the 1990’s there were plans to produce the RD-180 in the US, but the decision was made to simply buy them from Russia.
If this is true and comes to pass, it will be yet another in a long, dreary line of events that point out why international ventures between nations – in particular ventures where each nation produces something vital that the other nation does not – that really don’t like each other is a fundamentally bad idea. It will also point out the importance of having in-house capabilities, such as designing and building rocket engines.
Boeing, I imagine, won’t be too upset by this, as the Delta IV will be happy to pick up the slack from Atlas V. However, that will put US space launch in a bit of a bind, as we’d be restricted to the single heavy launcher. At least unless and until the SpaceX Falcon 9 Heavy becomes available.
The captain simply drew a straight line from Scotland to Belgium and said “let’s sail that.” Then got all surprised when some islands turned out to be in the way. Who knew that captaining could be so hard?
Snerk.
[youtube QCz8he36hsk]
I usually make some effort to avoid profanity in the post title, but screw it. I’m sick, light-headed, probably low blood oxy levels, and this particular news item pisses me off to no end.
In short: measles is a disease that is largely a thing of the past in the US. However, there is an effective way for this disease to make a comeback: for large numbers of people to *not* vaccinate their children. One can have all kinda of bad feelings towards collectivism , groupthink and government programs and still recognize the value of vaccination programs, not only for the individual but also for the larger society. But there are some groups and individuals who have slipped into utter madness and have declared that vaccinations are bad/evil/Of-The-Devil/whatever. The result is that they tend to refuse vaccinations for themselves and for their children. And if that meant that they – and only they – would be smited by the occasional random plague, then this would be a self-correcting problem, and something largely laudable (dumbasses selecting themselves out of the gene pool? Who *wouldn’t* be all for it?). But the problem is that when the number of people refusing vaccinations gets large enough, the process of herd immunity begins to break down. This helps to speed the spread of the disease to the unvaccinated… but, worse, by providing a larger pool of the successfully infected, the disease in question now has a vastly increased capacity to mutate into a form that the current vaccines do not effectively cover.
And so, to the specific story: the Eagle Mountain International Church in Newark, Texas, is the epicenter of a measles outbreak. A churchgoer recently visited Indonesia where he contracted the disease, and then spread it at the church – a high-density facility with lots of people in close proximity, mingling freely, probably shouting and singing loudly within a contained environment, with a good chance of lots of physical contact and probably lots of gathering and chatting around food and water supplies… *exactly* the sort of setup you want if you want to spread a contagion.
As if the basic logistics of the church wasn’t bad enough to serve as the nexus of an outbreak, the pastor, Terri Copeland Pearsons, seems tailor made to make things much, much worse:
“The concerns we have had are primarily with very young children who have family history of autism and with bundling too many immunizations at one time”
And this nugget of wisdom:
“So I’m going to tell you what the facts are, and the facts are the facts, but then we know the truth. That always overcomes facts”
Oy.
On the one hand: this sort of thing is really, really bad… and it makes Christians of good will and good intellect, who know better than to buy into the anti-vaxxer rubbish, look like idjits by association. Thus it would seem that non-crazy Christians and Christian organizations should be leading the fight against this nonsense, just as they should be leading the fight against the “Intelligent Design” movement.
On the other hand: it seems to me that a psyops campaign can/should be led in various overseas locations to spread the belief that vaccines are evil, horrible abominations. Let’s say… “a basic and universal component of vaccines is pig lard.” Or “vaccines are a conspiracy of western Crusaders and Zionists.” I believe most everyone would agree that using a cropduster to spread some horrific contagion over a civilian populace, even a city in an enemy land, would be horribly wrong and a war crime. But convincing people that preventing themselves from getting diseases? Hmmm.